Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Sad and senseless

This morning, a man entered the Regions Bank office in downtown McComb (my hometown) and killed an employee and a customer. He kidnapped his ex-wife and fled south on Highway 51. He killed his ex-wife and threw her out of the car in Fernwood, continuing south. My mother-in-law was driving at the time and saw him turn into our neighborhood with the passenger door of the car hanging open. He turned again, drove down to the Cemetery, and shot himself, later dying at the hospital in McComb. Four dead within minutes in McComb.

2 comments:

Not really any sense to be made out of it. I think we actually tend to get into more trouble when people start trying to rationalize irrational acts. There's been a recent spurt nationally and regionally of violent crime on or near college campuses. Parents and students in a very human attempt to turn a Black Swan into something that's predictable and stoppable start to panic and begin to insist on practices (like personally searching all student belongings) that violate reason, ethic, and the law.

I'm not saying that sometimes lessons can't be learned from these situations, but very often they are what they are: random, unforseeable, unpredictable. Sometimes, very sadly and very tragically, life ends. I don't want to minimize the pain and suffering to the survivors. I would certainly be angry or deeply saddened if it happened to friends or family. But I also hope that I would not try to Monday-morning quarterback it, looking for clues that were not there or were there but unrecognizable as a pattern.

Who writes this stuff anyway?

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